When Did Humans Come to
the Americas?Recent
findings date their arrival earlier than thought, sparking
hot debate among archaeologistshttp://www.smithsonianmag.com/
Condensed by Native Village

Florida: The slow-moving Aucilla River
in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through
bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and
preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first
Americans.

For years adventurous divers had hunted
fossils and artifacts in Aucilla sinkholes. They found
stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals.

Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from
the Florida Museum of Natural History opened a formal
excavation in one particular sink. Below undisturbed
sediment they found nine stone flakes chipped from a larger
stone, most likely from a person making tools and projectile
points. They also found a mastodon tusk, scarred by circular
cut marks from a knife. The tusk was 14,500
years old.

Suddenly, the Aucilla sinkhole became
one of the earliest places in the Americas to show a human
presence. Curiously, most scholars ignored these
findings and remained convinced that America’s earliest
settlers arrived 13,500 years ago.

But now the sinkhole is getting a fresh
look. So are other archaeological sites that
show evidence of an earlier -- perhaps much earlier -- human presence in the Americas

Michael Waters is director of the
Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M
University. He organized archaeologists and divers to gather
more evidence of the sinkhole’s role in prehistory.

“This site is as old as anything in
North America,” Waters said. “The context is fine, and the
dating is fine, but people just looked at it and said, ‘Hmm,
that’s interesting,’ and that was it. It had a lot of
potential, but it was in limbo. We’re here to confirm the
earlier work, and if we’re lucky, we’ll find some more
artifacts.”

Led by underwater archaeologist Jessi
Halligan, Waters’s team worked at the Page-Ladson sink. The
sink lies 30 feet below the Aucilla's
surface which, after heavy rains, turns nearly black from
humus from hardwood hammock. Fish, birds, turtles gators
live here. Halligan’s divers were the only
human presence.

Underwater archaeological sites were
staked out and marked in meter-square quadrants. Divers
troweled mud into a small suction dredge which emptied into mesh
screens mounted on a skiff. Big pieces—stones, bones, leaves
and perhaps human artifacts—collected on the top screen. Small stuff
was caught by the sixteenth-inch mesh
below.

First the researchers cleared
15 years of detritus that
accumulated after the first excavation ended. Then, to reach the most
promising level, divers removed a ten-foot layer of clay. The work was tedious—“like diving in dark
roast coffee,” said archaeologist James Dunbar, a
member of the first Aucilla team. Everything below the sediment was as old
as the people who left it there. In the oxygen-deprived
mud deposits of the Aucilla River, nothing decays.

The divers unearthed small
bone fragments, the vertebra of a large mammal and
a shoulder blade -- possibly that of the same mastodon whose tusk bore the cut marks of
ancient hunters. Also recovered were
pounds of mastodon digesta, the remains of vegetation
that the six-ton beast chewed and
swallowed.

The researchers' findings validated the original
excavation, as did their findings on later expeditions. Each new discovery generated fresh
enthusiasm.

“All we need now,” said Halligan, “are more
human artifacts.”

History

About
100,000 years ago, modern human
beings started spreading out from their African homelands to
occupy Europe and Asia. They even went to Australia by sea,
displacing or absorbing Neanderthals and other archaic
hominid species.

That diaspora took about 70,000
years,
and when it was completed our ancestors stood triumphant.

The peopling of the Americas, scholars
tend to agree, happened sometime in the past
25,000 years.
The standard view of events is that a wave of Siberian
hunters crossed the Bering Strait to the New World at the
end of the last ice age. At the time, the Bering
Strait was a land bridge formed by glaciers and continental
ice sheets.

The key question
is: when did this migration occur? Researchers suggest that it happened
between 25,000 -12,900 years ago.

For decades the most compelling
evidence consisted of human-made projectile points found in
New Mexico called “Clovis points. ” Radiocarbon dating
determined that the Clovis sites were 13,500
years old. The
idea that these Clovis people were
the first Americans quickly won over the research community.

“The evidence was unequivocal,” said
Ted Goebel, from the Center for the Study of the First
Americans. Clovis sites, it turned out, were spread across
the continent, and “there was a clear association of the
fauna with hundreds, if not thousands, of artifacts,” Goebel
said. “Again and again it was the full picture.”

Furthermore, the earliest Clovis dates
corresponded roughly to the right geological moment.

“It was a very nice package, and that’s
what sealed the deal,” Goebel said. “Clovis as the first
Americans became the standard, and it’s really a high bar.”

The hunters spread across the U.S. and
Mexico, the story goes. They pursued prey until the last
cold snap, when too few animals
remained to support them. Radiocarbon
dates show that most megafauna became extinct around
12,700
years ago. The Clovis points disappeared then as well,
perhaps because there were no longer any large animals to
hunt.

Over time, the Clovis theory acquired
the force of dogma. Any artifacts or theories that cast doubt on the
Clovis-first idea, were ridiculed.

skeptics

Take South America. In the late 1970s,
U.S. archaeologist Tom D. Dillehay and his colleagues began
excavating an ancient settlement at Monte Verde in
Chile. In a creek bog, excavators found cordage,
mastodon remains, stone choppers, augers, plant remains,
edible seeds and traces of wild potatoes. Radiocarbon readings showed that the site was 14,800
years old, predating Clovis by more than
1,000 years.

But -- there were no Clovis points. Did
Clovis hunters go to South America without their trademark
weapons (highly unlikely)? Or, did people settle in South
America even before the Clovis people arrived?

There must have been “people somewhere
in the Americas 15,000 or 16,000 years ago, or perhaps as
long as 18,000 years ago,” said Dillehay, now at Vanderbilt
University.

Dillehay was singled out
for special criticism. He was all but ostracized by Clovis
advocates for years. When he was invited to meetings,
speakers denounced Monte Verde. “

It’s not fun
when people write to your dean and try to get you fired,” he
recalled. “And then your grad students try to get jobs and
they can’t get jobs.”

The
Monte Verde site gained wider acceptance after well-known
archaeologists visited it in 1997
and verified the integrity of Dillehay's work. Dillehay was
pleased, “but it was a small group of people,” he said,
meaning others in the profession continued to harbor doubts.

The skepticism lingers. Gary Haynes, a
University of Nevada-Reno anthropologist and a Clovis
advocate, is not convinced. “There are only a few artifacts,
and no flakes,” he said of Monte Verde. “There are a lot of things that have
been interpreted as artifacts but don’t look like them. Many
of the things may not be the same age, because it is
difficult to know exactly where they were found in the
site.”

Dillehay rebuffs the criticisms with
these arguments:

More
than1,500 pages were published on Monte Verde
-- five times more than were ever written on any other site in
the Americas, including Clovis.

All artifacts came
from the same surface covered by the peat bog. All
made sense in terms of the site’s activities.

The great majority of artifacts are flaked pebble tools, typical of South American unifacial technologies.

North Americans impose their
evaluations on South America without even knowing the data
down south.”

“Now the field has moved on, and there
are numerous pre-Clovis sites that have come to the
forefront,” he said.

NEW EVIDENCE

The
Buttermilk Creek archaeological site
lies near Austin, Texas. In a layer of
earth beneath a Clovis excavation, researchers led by
Waters have found 15,528 pre-Clovis
artifacts. Most are toolmaking chert flakes, but
56 are actual chert tools. Using luminescence techniques,
they found that the oldest artifacts dated to
15,500 years ago --
2,000 years older than Clovis.
The work “confirms the emerging view that people occupied
the Americas before Clovis,” the researchers concluded in
2011. Waters’ believes the people who made
the oldest artifacts might have been experimenting with stone
technology. Over time, that technology may have developed into
Clovis-style tools.

Waters
has also collaborated with Thomas Stafford from Stafford
Research Laboratories to debunk the Clovis theory. Using
accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), a dating technique more
precise than radiocarbon, they reanalyzed a mastodon rib
recovered in Manis, Washington that had a projectile point lodged in it. The original radiocarbon
tests showed it to be 13,800
years old—centuries older than
Clovis. The new AMS tests confirmed those findings. DNA showed that the projectile point was
mastodon bone.

Waters and
Stafford also used AMS technlogy to retest many known Clovis samples from around
the country. The results, Waters said, “blew me away.”
Instead of a culture spanning about
700 years, the results shrunk the Clovis window from
13,100 to 12,800 years ago.
This meant
Siberian hunters had only 300
years to negotiate the ice-free Bering Strait, settle
two continents and put the megafauna on the road to
extinction.

“Not
possible,” Waters said. “You’ve got people in South America
at the same time as Clovis, and the only way they could have
gotten down there that fast is if they transported like
‘Star Trek.’ ”

But Haynes disagrees. “Think of a small number of very
mobile people covering a lot of ground,” he suggests. “They
could have been walking thousands of kilometers per year.”

Goebel says his own attitude about
pre-Clovis finds is “acceptance with reservation.” He's disturbed by “nagging” shortcomings.
He says each older site appears to be one-of-a-kind, without
a regional pattern. With Clovis, original sites were part of
something bigger.

This absence of a consistent pre-Clovis
pattern “is one of the things that has hung up a lot of
people, including myself,” he said.

Boats, Superhighways, Points, and DNA

The discovery of
pre-Clovis artifacts
requires scholars
to come up with new ideas about how and when people
first arrived in the Americas. If humans were living here
14,800 years ago, they didn't
come use the ice-free Siberian Strait corridor. It did not appear for
another 1,000 years.

Maybe the first Americans came in small boats and followed the coastline. That possibility was suggested
in the 1950s when Clovis-era
human bones—but no artifacts -- were found on Santa Rosa Island off the California coast.

Over the past
decade, though, archaeologists have unearthed projectile points from Santa Rosa and other Channel
Islands. They also uncovered remains of fish, shellfish,
seabirds and seals. Radiocarbon dates show much of the organic
material was about 12,000 years old, roughly within the
Clovis time frame.

The findings aren't proof that North
America's first settlers came by sea. The
islands were only four miles offshore at the time and
could have been visited by mainland people. Still, the sites
prove that these island
dwellers were seafarers of a sort and accustomed to a
seafood diet.

Jon Erlandson
is a University of Oregon
archaeologist, and Rick Torbin is an archaeologist from the
Smithsonian. They propose a
pre-Clovis “kelp highway” for coast-hugging seamen that may
have skirted the southern edge of the Bering land bridge
from northeast Asia to the New World.

“People came between
15,000 and
16,000 years ago” by sea, and “could eat the same
seaweed and seafood as they moved along the coastline in
boats,” Erlandson said. “It seems logical.”

The idea of
ancient people traveling great distances by boat isn’t
far-fetched. Many anthropologists believe that humans
voyaged from the Asian mainland to Australia
45,000 years
ago.

While Erlandson is convinced
that the Clovis were not the first people in the Americas,
he admits that definitive proof of a kelp superhighway may never be found. Whatever beach settlements
existed in those days of low sea levels were submerged or swept away by Pacific tides.

Erlandson
also points out that theChannel Islands projectiles have nothing
in common with Clovis points. They are related to a
different toolmaking approach called the western stemmed
tradition. These have different shaped stems that attach projectile points to spears or darts.
And while Clovis points are fluted, these are not.
Such points were
prevalent in the Pacific Northwest and the Great Basin. This
indicates that other tool-making
human cultures were in the Americas at the same time
as the Clovis people -- perhaps beforehand, as
well.

The link between Channel Islands'
artifacts and the western stemmed tradition have reached
Oregon. There, inside the Paisley Caves, scientists excavated similar points
along with organic material that dates
13,000 years old—contemporary with Clovis.

Dennis L.
Jenkins from the University of Oregon led the Paisley excavation.
The site had first been explored in the 1930s. The earlier documentation
didn't show a
definite association between the bones and artifacts found.
Jenkens re-examined the area and soon “we had artifacts and we had the bones” from
the site.

The researchers used radiocarbon dating
tests on petrified
human feces. They also analyzed human mitochondrial
DNA, probably shed from the intestinal wall. The DNA came from a modern human with an
apparently Asian genome. The toolmakers had lived 13,000
years ago.

“And there is nothing connecting this
to any Clovis site,” Jenkins said. “You have two
technologies existing at the same time in North America, and
there is no direct immediate relationship. We’ve convinced the people
who are willing to be convinced that the caves are as old as
Clovis, if not older.”

radical ideas, overpopulation, and dinosaur tusks

Perhaps the most radical scholarly work
is the theory of Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley.
(Stanford is a curator of North
American archaeology at the National Museum of Natural
History. Bradley is an archaeologist at Britain’s University
of Exeter) They suggest European immigrants colonized the
Americas several thousand years before Clovis.

Their book, Across Atlantic
Ice, suggests that Europeans reached the New
World more than 20,000 years ago.
These Europeans settled in the eastern
U.S., developed the Clovis technology over
thousand of years, then spread across the continent.

This theory points out
similarities between Clovis points and “laurel leaf” points
from the Solutrean culture. The Solutreans flourished in southwestern France and northern Spain
24,000 - 17,000 years ago. Artifacts found at
several pre-Clovis sites, including Page-Ladson, Meadowcroft Rock Shelter
(PA) and the sand dunes of Cactus Hill (VA) have similarities to Solutrean
technologies.

The Solutreans territory on the
European continent was apparently compact. Over time,
encroaching glaciers and extreme cold may have
forced them to cluster on the Atlantic coast. Stanford and
Bradley say the stress of overpopulation may have forced
some Solutreans to escape by sea. They headed north and west
beneath the Atlantic ice sheet and landed in North America
at the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.

Evidence
for Solutrean presence in America includes stone artifacts
found at several sites on Chesapeake Bay. All proved to be more than
20,000 years old. While most
dates were taken from
organic material, the exception was
a mastodon tusk. The tusk, with bone and teeth attached, was netted by a
fisherman in 1974. Along with
it was a laurel leaf-shaped stone
knife. Stanford found the tusk to be 22,760 years old.

Among
other things, the Solutrean hypothesis provides context not
only for the Clovis people, but also for North America’s
pre-Clovis sites. And it does not rule out Bering Sea
migrations—those could have happened, too.

“Solutrean evolved into Clovis over
close to 13,000 years,” Stanford said.
Clovis
hunters then migrated westward when the cold snap brought
dry, windy, inhospitable weather to the East Coast.

But the archaeological evidence supporting a European migration more than
20,000
years ago has raised skepticism. Just like the
kelp highway, many sites which could prove or disprove this
theory are now underwater.

But the critics
won't stop Stanford and Bradley from pushing forward.

“Solutrean people became more
and more efficient in exploiting the rich sea margin
resources,” they write in Across Atlantic Ice.
“Eventually their range expansion led them to a whole new
world in the west.”

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